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Monday, November 02, 2009

Number 622

Cave Girl and the Mau Mau

The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, Africa, between 1952-1960, was a real event and atrocities were committed both by insurgents and the British who were colonizing Kenya at the time. It led to Kenyan independence, but not before a lot of people were killed.

Cave Girl (another blonde jungle girl! See the list at the bottom of this posting for other comic book jungle gals) was a character from Magazine Enterprises, drawn by Bob Powell and his assistants. This story is from Cave Girl #13, 1954. Even with all of the action going on in this story, Cave Girl manages to keep the flower in her hair. It switches sides from panel to panel, but stays in her hair.

A couple of months ago I was contacted by e-mail by Bashir Faruqui, a reader who wondered if I'd ever seen a picture of Bob Powell. Here's a picture of Powell and his assistants in the late 1940s, around the time he was doing The Shadow Comics for Street and Smith. Powell is wearing an eyeshade and glasses.

I scanned the photo from the book, Six Men of Evil and The Devil Monsters, two Shadow pulp novels reprinted by Nostalgia Ventures in 2007. The picture of the Powell shop is from the chapter by Anthony Tollin on Shadow Comics.

10 comments:

You gotta love the way the writer tosses in anti-communist sentiment ("some of their leaders even went to Moscow....") into a story that apparently wasn't sensational enough with just a sexy scantily clad woman, a terrorist insurrection, head "chopping," a pile of wild animals, and an undercurrent of racism.

On the other hand, Powell's art is beautiful and the inclusion of most of the above mentioned elements shows just how talented the fella was -- not to mention the little caption panel, for which I admittedly have some sort of fetish.

Actually I gotta say, I think this old "funny book" is more honest about Mau Mau Marxism than most "establishment" treatments today, including the wiki article.

I had an English professor in college who grew up in Kenya as a diplomat's son and attended a boarding school run by missionaries. He had vivid memories of native fathers who were forced to watch helplessly as their babies were hacked in half-- by their own Mau Mau countrymen-- because they would not denounce capitalism and the evil religion of a Jew named Jesus Christ. This crap really happened...

Anyway your blog is amazing! Thanks for provided all of this great escapism for me and my kids.

Oh gosh, the amount of ignorance here is despicable, how unfortunate. The Mau Mau were not communists or socialists or capitalists. They were the native Africans fighting against the oppression, torture and abuses of the British colonial empire. Also, Kenya is not a jungle, it consists mostly of savanna grasslands...c'mon even such basic grade school knowledge is missing here.Sad!!